It’s embarrassing that it takes a Republican from New Hampshire to state the obvious:

New York officials were outraged Tuesday when a Republican lawmaker compared a planned rail line to the Ground Zero vicinity with pointless pork-barrel projects, calling it a “train to nowhere.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had attached nearly $2 billion to a transportation bill to extend the existing AirTrain between JFK Airport and Jamaica, Queens, to lower Manhattan.

But Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, complained on the chamber floor that New Yorkers were trying to fleece taxpayers.

“They have decided to raid the federal treasury for the purposes of building this, this train to nowhere,” Gregg told fellow senators.

An incensed Schumer insisted Ground Zero is hallowed ground, not a dead-end destination, and that the cash is the “last part of the $20 billion that President Bush promised to New York after 9/11″ to rebuild the devastated city.

“It was always intended for transportation projects around lower Manhattan,” Schumer said. “It is blasphemy to New Yorkers and all Americans to exploit the sanctity of Ground Zero to score a cheap political point.”

Gregg’s portrayed the effort as a “train to nowhere” was an allusion tohis Republican colleague Sen. Ted Stevens’s infamous “bridge to nowhere” — a $223 million project to connect a tiny Alaskan island to the mainland.

“This ‘nowhere’ of lower Manhattan is also the heart of American and world finance,” said Mayor Bloomberg’s spokesman, Stu Loeser. “The senator might not remember what happened there seven years ago and what happens there every day, but the rest of us cannot forget.”

One of Gregg’s top aides insisted the senator wasn’t trying to sting New York’s 9/11 victims, but to point to a questionable project.